Firetrust Support Forums

So I'm trying out MailWasher Pro, great program indeed. One problem I'm running in to is the following. I'll get some bogus junkmail that will be from "Bank of America" (or some other fake source) but the return email address is forged to show MY email address. Therefore, if I mark the spam as junk it will mark all emails sent from me as spam, if I add it as as good email it will let all the spam through. The issue is that there are alot of legimitate sources that use this same technique, sending an email that is not spam with the from address as my valid email address. Is there any way around this, it's driving me crazy!

By marking as junk are you meaning adding to the blacklist or training the learning tool?

Adding any spammer's forged address to the blacklist is pretty much a waste of time, they can forge more addresses than your computer can hold. Save the blacklist for addresses you know are not forged.

Adding a spam message to the learning tool will not mark other messages from you as spam, the tool looks at the whole message and uses Bayesian filtering to decide how to mark it, not just the easily forged address.

Your best bet is to remove your address from the friends list and instead create a filter that looks for the entire from line. Using "entire header" and "contains" followed by a copy and paste of the from line in your message works well for this.

OK so I know how to use the filer, but i'm not sure why legitimate emails are displayed the way they are. My mother in law sends me an email and the from line looks like this "motherinlaw@aol.com (mylegitimateemail@hotmail.com)". If I add this email to friends list it adds mylegitimateemail@hotmail.com instead of motherinlaw@aol.com, even though the email obviously came from motherinlaw@aol.com. Why would her legitimate emails coming from AOL show MY email address in the from line? I can't add her to the friends list as it only adds mylegitimateemail@hotmail.com instead of hers... Is this the way it's supposed to work?

I have no idea about AOL's mail mangling aside from the fact that I refuse to try and deal with e-mails from them or to touch a computer that has AOL installed.

Are you collecting the e-mail from hotmail or forwarding it from there to another account where you are downloading it? Hotmail is another mail service that isn't big on following standards, it may be fouling up the header data.

Instead of trying to get these two bad net citizens to clean up their act why not just deal with their misbehavior in MW?

If you look at the incoming message (using the source view) you can pick out the line in the header that identifies the source of the message and put it in a filter that will protect the message. Fast, simple, low frustration and it just works.